glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in
various degrees of fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day
world from under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most
dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.
Occasionally, indeed, Mrs. Glegg wore one of her third-best fronts on
a week-day visit, but not at a sister's house; especially not at Mrs.
Tulliver's, who, since her marriage, had hurt her sister's feelings
greatly by wearing her own hair, though, as Mrs. Glegg observed to
Mrs. Deane, a mother of a family, like Bessy, with a husband always
going to law, might have been expected to know better. But Bessy was
always weak!

So if Mrs. Glegg's front to-day was more fuzzy and lax than usual, she
had a design under it: she intended the most pointed and cutting
allusion to Mrs. Tulliver's bunches of blond curls, separated from
each other by a due wave of smoothness on each side of the parting.
Mrs. Tulliver had shed tears several times at sister Glegg's
unkindness on the subject of these unmatronly curls, but the
consciousness of looking the handsomer for them naturally administered
support. Mrs. Glegg chose to wear her bonnet in the house
to-day,--united and tilted slightly, of course--a frequent practice of
hers when she was on a visit, and happened to be in a severe humor:
she didn't know what draughts there might be in strange houses. For
the same reason she wore a small sable tippet, which reached just to
her shoulders, and was very far from meeting across her well-formed
chest, while her long neck was protected by a _chevaux-de-frise_ of
miscellaneous frilling. One would need to be learned in the fashions
of those times to know how far in the rear of them Mrs. Glegg's
slate-colored silk gown must have been; but from certain
constellations of small yellow spots upon it, and a mouldy odor about